Life is a carnival for MEPs

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

2/15/12, 9:09 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 9:15 PM CET

Who fancies a trip to Haiti?

After the recent freezing weather in Europe, the prospect of a trip to the Caribbean might seem attractive. But a delegation of seven MEPs from the Parliament’s budgetary control committee seems to have drawn a short straw. Next week (22 February), they will be going to Haiti to check up on the use of EU emergency aid.

The EU and its member states pledged a total of €1.2 billion in aid for Haiti after the earthquake of January 2010. Of that amount, €522 million was to come from the EU budget, but less than half (€210m) has so far been given out. Most of that has gone to rebuilding homes, food aid and agriculture programmes. Additional aid has been given to support the Haitian government and to fight a cholera epidemic.

Jan Mulder, a Dutch Liberal MEP, is leading the delegation, which will speak to EU, UN and Haitian officials about the effect of the aid. Jean-Pierre Audy, a French centre-right MEP, said the delegation hoped to find out whether reports of fraud and corruption involving EU aid funds were true. Mulder said that the impression given by aid groups was that the EU-funded projects were “a bit problematic”.

Mulder is probably too Calvinist to have noticed that he is taking his delegation to Haiti at carnival time. Similarities with the Bond movie Live And Let Die are purely accidental.